Are we a democracy or are we a monarchy?
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So now we’ve got our national emergency. It’s absolute bullshit. Everyone—including The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote himself—is under no illusions about this. It is two things: ego and politics. It’s about ego because Trump is pissed that he’s noAre we a democracy or are we a monarchy?
So now we’ve got our national emergency. It’s absolute bullshit. Everyone—including The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote himself—is under no illusions about this. It is two things: ego and politics. It’s about ego because Trump is pissed that he’s not getting what he wanted from Congress on the wall. And it’s about politics because he needs to mollify his base: the followers of Rush Limbaugh (who continued to maintain, just this week, that “Building the wall is fundamental.”), Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, people who are really going to be pissed off that he couldn’t get what he wanted from Congress on the wall. Trump wants to get that wall. Trump needs to get that wall. And he’s willing to destroy our democracy in order to do it. xThis bill must NOT be signed by @realDonaldTrump.— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) February 14, 2019 During the shutdown Trump floated the idea of declaring a national emergency, and in a post about a month ago I laid out the reasons why doing so were fraudulent in terms of the facts. I concluded that: We have three branches of government because our founders believed that investing too much power in any one branch could, and likely would, lead to tyranny. If Trump does as he has threatened and manages to get away with it, he will not have ended a crisis, he will instead have plunged us into one as dangerous as any which our democracy has faced. Additionally, Mark Sumner has revisited these issues in a terrific analysis—which includes a brilliant takedown of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s role as an enabler in this disgrace—as have others, so I'm not going to do another overview of why this declaration of a national emergency is so dangerous to our constitutional democracy. In this post, I’d like to discuss some important historical examples of the executive branch, here and abroad, exercising authority to spend the people’s money, in the hope that doing so will bring some clarity to what Individual 1 is plotting here. Read more